Creative process

Henrik Olsen: Our overall creative process involves the discovery, strategy,then design, then build and then transfer and those are sort of the five big phases that we go through.Renee Anderson: Research, which we also discovery, is the first step in the process. That's where we gather all of the information that we need in order tounderstand the problem that we're facing. We need to understand the space that we're in. We can't just go design something pretty, without understandingthe problem that we are trying to solve.

Maria Giudice: And then you get all of this stuff and you ask the question,well, what do I do with all this stuff? How does it all fit together? And you come up with a strategic concept and that could be sketches or drawingsor you know if you are sketching a layout for magazine or you are sketching aweb page, so you are putting all of these things that you have learned andputting it into some sort of holistic framework and that's called strategy.Katrina Alcorn: And then design is really about, the way we define design,it's about fleshing out the strategy ideas. So it's all the detailed that comes outof that, it's what's on a page. What follows with the structure of the site.

Henrik Olsen: And at that point the user experience folks are generally farenough along with their key schematics, so we can take those and we can startto bring on, layer on the visual design into those and so that all of a suddenthey really come to life.Michael Polivka: And then it goes into the build phase and making it happen,having the right partner lined up, having the team stay on the project andbuild is also really important. Those designers who came up with the comps,process and build.

Renee Anderson: The very last phase is called transfer, where once the site haswho have been with the client all along will be critical for the quality assurancebeen built, we make sure that it's actually done correctly and that all of the assetsthat we have created over the course of the project are then transferredinto the hands of the client and they own it from that point.Michael Polivka: Put all that together and kind of shake it up a littledifferently in each project and it kind of comes out the same. Great design workthat sees its way through to being a final product.Marie Giudice: You can have a process, but the client will always be different.So you have to be really responsive to what they need and how they want to work with you.

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Released

2/27/2009

Hot Studio founder Maria Giudice and her exceptional multi-disciplinary design team "make the complex beautifully clear" for web clients like eBay, Gap, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Maria focuses the studio's work on people-centered design to create amazing user experiences on the web and in print. See how they apply "collective intelligence" through the phases of discovery, strategy, design, and building. This installment of Creative Inspirations takes viewers inside one of the coolest design firms around.